If you want a hard core guild expect hard core questions. Chances are the guild is run and contains a lot of players dedicated to just that with a possessive obsession to check WoL and other similar websites daily. They will want to know your PC specs, your macros, how often you take a toilet break and etc etc.
If you want a casual guild then go for one that has less questions, or even better one that doesn't require an application. A chat to a few members over Skype or Vent should be enough.

Lol, this seems a bit excessive.

I've had to fill out applications before but I always preferred bringing the applicant to some farm status raids to see their performance. It's not always a great indiction of how they'll be during progression, but at least you get to see them performing in a raid environment. Gear doesn't always tell the full story - i've been surprised a handful of times to see people in sub-par gear performing well above expectations. If the applicant runs into fights that he may be new to, you also see if he can listen to strats. It's always nice if people read up on strats in advance, but if they don't listen and can't adjust on the fly, it's really not that helpful for the raid. If recruiting for a role that requires extra communication (tank/healer), you can see if they know when to speak up (and if they're willing to do so). Since farm content usually has a lot of faceroll time, it's also a good way to see if they can mesh with the other guildmates during vent chatter.

Guild applications are almost like a job application these days... the last guild i looked at besides having an extensive application form also wanted you to come online, for 1/2 hour interview on Teamspeak.

Guild applications are almost like a job application these days... the last guild i looked at besides having an extensive application form also wanted you to come online, for 1/2 hour interview on Teamspeak.

It just drains the all energy out of joining a guild for me...

To be fair, it's important that you can be comfortable with the people joining your guild or the other way around. Text chat doesn't do that justice, nor does a written application. Not only do you want your guild to communicate well in a raid / arena / BG you want it to be where everyone's comfortable talking with each other and a place where they can have fun. That 30 minute interview could in fact save you hours or even days of wasted time if you realize that you don't really click with the rest of the guild.

To be fair, it's important that you can be comfortable with the people joining your guild or the other way around. Text chat doesn't do that justice, nor does a written application. Not only do you want your guild to communicate well in a raid / arena / BG you want it to be where everyone's comfortable talking with each other and a place where they can have fun. That 30 minute interview could in fact save you hours or even days of wasted time if you realize that you don't really click with the rest of the guild.

A lot of what's in the recruitment process are for your benefit too.

I'd much rather talk to the GM or officer over the vent than fill out inane forms with retarded questions. I absolutely understand a guild trying to get to know me personally, frankly I'd love the same. But I would most definitely not want to join the guild who want to control how I play the game.

I'd much rather talk to the GM or officer over the vent than fill out inane forms with retarded questions. I absolutely understand a guild trying to get to know me personally, frankly I'd love the same. But I would most definitely not want to join the guild who want to control how I play the game.

I've already discussed the retarded questions bit. Some of those are important, depending on what kind of guild you are applying to and sometimes some of them can be overlooked if you can prove you're a solid player via logs... which I don't think is a terrible thing to ask for these days.

Checking the interface is a bit silly imo, what if someone uses default UI? What is there to see? I bet it's to make sure mages don't have arcane blast all over their bars anymore or to find maybe cool UIs from people and download the UI themselves :P

I remember when the application was full of common sense questions and if they liked how you answered and if you had the right gear level, you would be taken on a raid as a tryout; usually an alt run, unless it was a 25 man. If you did well then, you usually got in; stood in fire, thanks for the application but we're gonna look elsewhere.

I've been searching for a new guild recently and today I came accross several seperate guilds with the same really odd questions in their application forms.

They're asking:
1) To list ALL macros I use... in full! (I have about 30 macros on my warlock, are they insane?)
2) To submit an annotated screenshot of my "raiding interface" with detailed descriptions (wtf?)
3) To detail my DPS rotation in multiple situations

I don't get why they're asking for this stuff, it's completely meaningless and offers no real information....

IMO as a guild leader I can see how questions like this would not entirely be used to judge somebody (ok maybe number 3 could...people need to know their rotations) but be used as a hurdle to help sort out the people who are willing to put in extra work that really want to be in the guild from the people like OP, who do not.
High end progression raiding takes hard work, determination, and lots of extra effort...the application is a test to see if you put in that extra effort or not.

IMO as a guild leader I can see how questions like this would not entirely be used to judge somebody (ok maybe number 3 could...people need to know their rotations) but be used as a hurdle to help sort out the people who are willing to put in extra work that really want to be in the guild from the people like OP.

It's also work from the applicant's end - helps weed out those that just spam apply and put no thought/effort. If you really want the guild, you'll put effort/thought. Yeah, it can be extreme since it's a game after all :P

Guild applications are almost like a job application these days... the last guild i looked at besides having an extensive application form also wanted you to come online, for 1/2 hour interview on Teamspeak.

It just drains the all energy out of joining a guild for me...

I applied to a guild like this a while ago. They didn't take me even though there were no other applicants. In fact the spot is still open. It took a few hours to write that apply because there was so many questions about my talents, rotation, boss tactics etc. I also had to record a log and I had never done that before.

They didn't tell the reason why they declined but it was probably my gear. I had something like 500 ilvl when ToT had been out for 2 weeks. Couldn't really have more without doing T14 heroic or clearing ToT since week 1. If I could do those why would I be looking for a new guild? I'd understand their high standards if they were a top 100 guild but they aren't even top 10 on my server.

Long and detailed guild applications are simply a system of how broken raiding guild culture is presently. At a time where recruiting is apparently very difficult and people are exiting the normal/heroic raiding game at an alarming rate, some guilds double-down on their requirements making them essentially more exclusive rather than inclusive.

To me, the ideal guild culture would be a lot more inclusive with multiple raid teams consisting of one or two main groups and as many 10-man farm groups as the guild officers can support. That way you have a pool of people who are raiding, perhaps a tier or two behind in some cases for experience and gearing, that can be brought along when opportunities arise. And perhaps a perceived "B" team can pull itself along and move up on its own. You also have more people potentially available for things like challenge mode dungeons, heroic scenarios and PVP if there's an interest in that. It's more management for the officers; that's true. But over the longer haul it's also more sustainable.

It's really clear to me that the way guilds currently handle things in the game is unsustainable over the long run and is the principal reason, after LFR, why the high-end raiding population is shrinking. Exclusivity will always limit your options; the more exclusive, the more limited you are. And that means an application process that's more generalized and more amenable to inserting a decent applicant--an applicant who may not be ready for the "A" team today but has that potential--into an appropriate slot in the guild.

Last edited by MoanaLisa; 2013-04-19 at 05:30 PM.

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if the guild is hardcore or looking serious at progress they will be lucky not to have you. If you cant realize why questions like "detailed rotation" are asked you don't have a place there(again, if its a serious/hardcore guild).

1 - Explaining what macro's you use, and why you use those specific macros show's your knowledge of the game and your class. Nothing wrong in asking an applicant this.

2 - The point behind a detailed screenshot pointing out where where everything is, and more importantly why is to help people see how you do it differently, and if its better than the next person, or if it is a better layout than what they are currently using. for example I would not recruit someone if they have 3 lots of mods doing the same thing without good reasons, or they had their mods set out in such a manor that it obstructed there field of view

3 - Rotations change a lot depending on the situation, Be that an AOE heavy fight, A fight that requires a lot of CC, a Straight up Patchwork fight, one thats heavy in movement. Knowing that someone knows the difference about what to do and when to do it, is better than having to explain to them or have to send them off to go research on what to do.

1 - Maybe. But listing the entire macros in full? That's a good way to waste a lot of space, but not really useful for anything else. Also mind that he was not asked to explain them, only list.

2 - Except you have no way of telling if this is actually a SS of that persons normal UI. Also, what might seem streamlined to you might be borderline unplayable for someone else.

3 - What makes you so sure they aren't just going to copy the rotations from the go-to guides for their class? They don't even need to understand them to do that, much less be capable of executing them.

Seems much more useful to me to just give the applicant a try and see what he can actually do instead of laboring of what he might be capable of.

Besides, it seems to me that this is far more likely to discourage people who might actually be good from applying rather than stop those nincompoops who just fill in junk.

if the guild is hardcore or looking serious at progress they will be lucky not to have you. If you cant realize why questions like "detailed rotation" are asked you don't have a place there(again, if its a serious/hardcore guild).

So here's the question: death of the guild, or relax your entry requirements?

Regardless of what WoL log parses I've ranked on, I've been turned down by a guild in the past because I didn't have enough keybindings than they were comfortable with. Then I went and joined a top world guild and did pretty well with them for a bit. I've also interviewed for guilds for 2 hours at a time just to be able to sell myself...to me, some of this was always part of the fun.

But I do agree, there has to be some type of limit to the insanity of some questions, especially with some guilds that really aren't that competitive.

Long and detailed guild applications are simply a system of how broken raiding guild culture is presently. At a time where recruiting is apparently very difficult and people are exiting the normal/heroic raiding game at an alarming rate, some guilds double-down on their requirements making them essentially more exclusive rather than inclusive.

To me, the ideal guild culture would be a lot more inclusive with multiple raid teams consisting of one or two main groups and as many 10-man farm groups as the guild officers can support. That way you have a pool of people who are raiding, perhaps a tier or two behind in some cases for experience and gearing, that can be brought along when opportunities arise. And perhaps a perceived "B" team can pull itself along and move up on its own. You also have more people potentially available for things like challenge mode dungeons, heroic scenarios and PVP if there's an interest in that. It's more management for the officers; that's true. But over the longer haul it's also more sustainable.

It's really clear to me that the way guilds currently handle things in the game is unsustainable over the long run and is the principal reason, after LFR, why the high-end raiding population is shrinking. Exclusivity will always limit your options; the more exclusive, the more limited you are. And that means an application process that's more generalized and more amenable to inserting a decent applicant--an applicant who may not be ready for the "A" team today but has that potential--into an appropriate slot in the guild.

My perspective as an officer from a semi-hardcore guild(emphasis on semi).

Inviting everyone that applies could possible the worst thing we could do right now. The case in my current guild is that we lost 4 of our main raiders in 1 week about 4 months ago and we haven't been able to recruit the roles that they filled adequately; the DPS of our recruits is severally lacking, and we even lost a healer and are praying that the 3 we kept show up every night.

The guild I was in before the one I'm currently in fell ill this exact predicament. What happens is we replace the raider we lost with whomever applies to the guild that looks OK. This keeps repeating and we slowly loose talent and move behind in progression.

This exact thing is starting to happen in the guild I'm in now; if we had the people we lost 4 months ago we would EASILY be 1-3/13 rather than just 11/12.

In Dragon Soul we started running 2 10 mans, one that was our main progression team and one where we had raid members who weren't needed in/'didnt need gear on certain bosses and casuals who didnt care for progression raiding. We did this until mid last tier. The fact was that we are a progression oriented guild and the switching we had to do per boss mixed with one group sometimes wiping 2-3 times on a boss cost us A LOT of time and we couldn't continue both runs if we wanted to stay competitive.

You can call us exclusive but the fact is that if we and most importantly the average guild like us will continue to shrink because we are forced to take sub-par players and in turn starts a chain that causes us to fall further and further behind in competitive raiding(server wide speaking).

I also think its important to mention we are not by any stretch of the imagination, exclusive; there are ~140 accounts in our guild and of those ~15 are raiders, we have more casuals than raiders. And if you look in my sig, we are slowly transitioning from a single WoW guild to other games because we realize that people will quit wow but maybe not want to give up on the community. (Lords of Alexstrasza, a subset of Overloaded gaming)

if the guild is hardcore or looking serious at progress they will be lucky not to have you. If you cant realize why questions like "detailed rotation" are asked you don't have a place there(again, if its a serious/hardcore guild).

Tbh, dont see the logic -"if you cant fill an app, you probably wont have patience to wipe 400+ times with us on H Rag".
Actually I did wipe a lot on Rag, very close to that number. But filling application like that is just insulting for me. Would rather quit wow, than join guild like that.
Only question is how many skilled and very skillled players they scared away with apps like that.